Cleanup Crew
by Chris7221
Summary: Keeping the Stargate program secret is a nearly impossible task. Thousands of people are involved at various levels of the program, from the leader of SG-1 to the janitor that cleans the toilets of the SGC. Sometimes there are loose ends that must be severed. His job is to deal with those loose ends. TWOSHOT - new epilogue chapter!
1. Cleanup Crew

**It's our job to make sure no one knows.**

"_You know that it's going to get out eventually. You can't keep a secret like that forever. Sooner or later, it's going to get out. Everyone will know."_

Julia Donovan, female, 41, reporter. Burned in studio fire caused by faulty lighting equipment, suspected but unconfirmed terrorist attack.

He remembered that one well, a little too well. That case was one of the easier ones to justify. The reporter was sticking her nose in where it didn't belong, despite repeated blocks and warnings. She knew about Prometheus, the Trust, the Asgard, the SGC. She had been helpful in the past, delivering cover stories in lieu of the real ones. But one day, they decided that her usefulness had reached its end, and she went on the list.

It was a messy kill. A month of preparation, to do it quick and clean, when the reporter suddenly sold her car and bought a new one. Someone else was probably smashed in a car crash caused by mechanical failure, but he didn't have time to dwell on that. They had to think fast and improvise. One maintenance worker outfit, a chain across the doors, and a frayed wire later, the deed was done. The investigation was stalled as a matter of national security. The reporter did a piece on Al-Qaida a week earlier, so it worked out. But there was collateral damage, and though inevitable, it was never something he was proud of. It was dirty. Unprofessional.

"_I guess after all that it was just an act, wasn't it? I was trying to do good, but I didn't know what was at stake. You intended to dispose of me all along, but you had to destroy me first. I'd rather have died at the hands of the Trust. I'd rather take my own life."_

Alec Colson, male, 52, executive. Assassinated by organized criminal elements over past illicit business.

As soon as he had shown the Asgard clone on live TV, the executive was marked for death. The SGC was able to discredit him, though it involved revealing working holographic technology in the process. Colson Industries was failing and his right-hand man was working with the Trust to keep him afloat. After being shown what was really at stake, he relented, and the SGC hid him offworld after the Trust made an attempt on his life. He disappeared from the public eye- hiding on another planet- and the sensation quickly died down. Years later, the executive returned to Earth, disgraced.

Though his situation was messy, his death was clean. He took care of this one personally, waiting in the woods outside the disgraced executive's home with a Remington 700 and a magazine full of Hornady V-Max. After Agent Harris drew the executive out, he fired three times in quick succession. One bullet missed, the other two found their mark. It was deer hunting season, and nobody thought much of the gunshots until it was too late. They revealed that the man was dirty, various agencies theorized he had been offed because of it, and despite the previous ruckus, everybody forgot about him within a month.

"_I swore to uphold the law. Protect the innocent, put the criminals behind bars. Criminals like you. But that doesn't matter, does it? You're above the law. I knew Samantha was black, but I didn't think she was this black. Killing me to protect your secrets."_

Pete Shanahan, male, 39, detective. Shot by drug dealer after blown working undercover in Denver.

Though he tried to steel himself against such things, he still didn't like thinking about the cop. Being romantically involved with a member of SG-1 wasn't grounds for removal, not on its own. If he was still involved, things might have been different. If Colonel Carter hadn't revealed everything, it might have been different. But it wasn't, and he knew too much, so he had to go. He was a good man, not bad or even in the moral grey, and that only made things harder.

The cop's situation both made things easier and it made them harder. The death of an officer would be thoroughly investigated, the death of an officer once engaged to an Air Force Colonel working on top-secret projects even more so. On the other hand, cops died. He kept things as simple as possible, working through underground channels to blow the cop's cover without blowing his own. It worked. When a local drug dealer found out the "dirty cop" wasn't as dirty as he thought he was, he whipped out his Glock and shot him, seven .40 S&W rounds, three through the chest, one through the neck, two through the left shoulder. In the minute it had taken to plant the evidence and confirm the kill, he had already figured it out, but it didn't matter in the end. The investigation turned up nothing, except that one Detective Pete Shanahan was carrying a single piece of ID that a gangster had noticed, a mix of bad judgement and bad luck.

"_So this is how it ends. Shot in the back by my own people. I know you black ops types do a lot of morally questionable shit, but I didn't think killing your own people was one of them. Guess I'm a liability the government can't afford. Well, come at me."_

Martin Edwards, male, 44, USAF. Fatally shot by an unknown home invader, who was never caught.

Killing a fellow soldier was probably the hardest thing he'd had to do. Even to his suppressed moral compass, it still felt wrong. But it was absolutely necessary, and he understood that. The colonel had been a problem even when he was serving with the SGC. He lead the naquadah mining operation on P3X-403, and ended up in a confrontation with the local population of Unas instead of working with them. Daniel Jackson had managed to defuse the situation, but the colonel ended up with more than a black mark on his record. He ended up marked as unreliable, a liability that had to be eliminated.

The job was one of his messier ones, not one that he was particularly proud of. The colonel was usually working, deployed somewhere. An attempt to sabotage a transport plane failed when the faulty engine was spooled up on the ground for testing and exploded, killing two of the wrong people. He elected to go in quick and silent, doing the deed up close and personal. It hadn't worked. The colonel noticed him breaking in to his house, even though the utmost care had been taken. The two ended up confronting each other, a gun in each of their hand. The support team was always ready, however, and throwing a rock through a window provided a long enough distraction for him to fire without getting hit. The investigation went nowhere and the killer was never found.

"_You're killing me? As if disrespecting me and ruining my academic reputation wasn't bad enough. I was starting to gain some respect for the military during my time on Atlantis, but it seems the only method you know to deal with a problem is to blow it up."_

Peter Kavanagh, male, 36, scientist. Severely injured by an accident in a high-energy physics experiment, died in hospital.

His hit list probably wasn't the only one the scientist was on. A former member of the Atlantis expedition, the scientist wasn't well liked. He constantly complained, formally and informally, that his work was not respected and disagreed with the military involvement in the program. He was usually more concerned with himself than others and had a tendency to pass out when threatened. The reasons for eliminating him were twofold. The scientist had spoken out against various elements of the program before and might do so publicly. If pressed or forced, he would probably give up classified information. That could not be allowed happen.

Most of the experiments the scientist carried out were relatively safe if proper procedures were followed, but could be extremely dangerous if they were not, or if certain protective features were removed. The experiment that killed the scientist was one involving particles in a small scale accelerator. Immense amounts of power had to be tightly regulated to keep the particles moving, and replacing a power regulator module with a faulty one was all that was needed to dangerously overload the coils. Blocking the flow of the cooling system and disabling the safety switch completed the sabotage. Doctoring the security camera footage erased some of the evidence, the fiery explosion completed the rest. After that, he visited the scientist in the hospital and slipped him a small amount of poison, just enough to kill the weakened man without being detected. There was collateral damage, of course, there always was. Six others ended up dead from the accident. It was unfortunate, but this was determined the best way to remove the scientist.

"_What did I do? I don't even know what the Stargate is! I designed the waste management system- the damn toilets! Sure, I started putting the pieces together, but it's not like I had any hard evidence. This... I mean, well, you're covering something up. You've only confirmed what I suspected!"_

Jessica Branton, female, 36, engineer. Currently kneeling with her head against the muzzle of his gun.

The engineer was a nobody, but an inevitable casualty of the scale of the program. An immense amount of engineering work was put into the construction of Earth's starships. Such work required thousands of engineers, draftspersons, architects, and designers. The very secret parts- shields, inertial dampeners, hyperdrive- were done in house, as was the overall design, but it was simply too large in scope to engineer every little component. Outside firms, most already having high levels of clearance, were hired to do work that was either purely theoretical, cleverly disguised, or both.

Of course, someone was going to put together the pieces, and there was a simple protocol in place for that. When they got close, they quietly disappeared. For one reason or another, it had been the engineer that designed the high-tech toilets on the Prometheus that started figuring things out, starting to seek out and put together all the hypothetical and cryptic projects.

He tracked her to her house, a small apartment in Chicago. It wasn't a very nice neighbourhood, and people got murdered all the time. A simple shooting would be sufficient. But when he had his finger on the trigger, he hesitated. It wasn't because he had to kill a woman- he'd shot plenty of members of the opposite gender. It wasn't because of the pleading look in her eyes- he'd learned to ignore that long ago. It wasn't because it was an unfair fight- a fair fight was a stupid one. In fact, he found himself unable to place the hesitation.

Maybe it was the sheer absurdity of it all. A toilet designer, finding out about a massive conspiracy, hunting down the clues, and ultimately ending up dead for it. She had a mundane but steady career, two children which she no longer had custody over, and a small dog that now lay on the floor in a pool of its own blood. Barely involved in the program, not even by her own choice, really, and now she was on the other end of his gun.

Maybe it was the crushing weight of every person he had killed. He tried to push out the faces, the names, the personal details. Round, asian, brown eyes. Angular, pale, crooked nose, blue eyes. Jared. Harper. Emily. Ryan. Lost only son in car accident. Liked shooting as a sport. Restoring a 1967 Corvette Sting Ray. No. He couldn't afford to lie awake at night. Couldn't afford to have regrets, doubts. The mission had to come first. Didn't it?

"Fuck it." Slowly, he took his finger off the trigger, flipped the safety on, and holstered his handgun. "Get the hell out of here."

He had barely finished the sentence when there were two loud bangs, quickly identified as gunshots. The woman before him collapsed to the floor, blood pouring from a hole in her forehead. He turned around searching for the shooter before noticing that his chest hurt. When he touched it, his gloved hand came away wet and sticky. He tried to bring up his own pistol, but his arms failed him, followed by the rest of his body, and he collapsed to the ground.

A lone figure stood in the doorway, wearing the same black BDUs and bullet-resistant vest that had ultimately done no good against the armour piercing ammo they used. She lowered the gun and spoke a few words quietly into a throat mic.

**Make sure no one knows it's our job.**


	2. The Mess You Leave Behind

****Now a twoshot. I've had this written for a while but never got around to posting it here. Sorry!

**Cleanup Crew Part 2**  
**The Mess You Leave Behind**

She flicked an errant speck of dust off of her uniform. She checked to make sure that every medal and ribbon was on right. It wasn't a colossal undertaking- in her line of work, you didn't get a lot of medals. She adjusted her skirt- God damn, she _hated_ skirts.

It was about a year prior when she knew she was screwed. A common trope among science fiction was that a space battle was an amazing light show when viewed from the planet below. She witnessed firsthand that it was more than just a trope. Later, she learned that three Lucian Alliance Ha'tak had engaged the Earth starships George S. Hammond and Odyssey, but the primary thought going through her head was that the walls were about to come crumbling down.

The old excuse of a meteor shower hadn't worked. As the days ticked by, disclosure seemed inevitable. No amount of killing, of silencing, of destroying records, would keep things under wraps. The job was over. Mission failed. The whole world was about to be blown wide open.

She ran. She knew how to be quiet, how to disappear. She had a couple hundred in an offshore bank account. Despite assurances to the contrary, they all knew what could happen. They became the hunted, and when the hunter came, the hunted scattered. Long before the feelers went out, she had deserted her post and was hiding on an island in the Caribbean.

It hadn't worked. She didn't know whether the government had somehow tracked her down using their advanced technology, whether there was a betrayal somewhere down the line, or if she just screwed up. It didn't matter. Before she knew it, she was on a military transport back Stateside.

As she stepped into the "courtroom"- really just a rearranged conference room- she knew it would be the last battle she fought. She knew that the proceeding was just a formality. The President had already signed off on her death warrant. Although they weren't going to go public- no, that would be too ironic- the cameras were rolling and the records were being kept. If anyone ever asked, they would let the whole world know that they did the right thing. She laughed a harsh laugh. The right thing. If they were smart, she would have just disappeared in the middle of the night.

They began calling her out one her past crimes, but the opening of the trial flew in one ear and out the other. She saw only faces, and heard different voices. As the men and women she had killed- their faces, names, personalities, relationships, careers, idiosyncrasies- flashed through her mind, she realized bitterly what had happened to her predecessor. He couldn't pull the trigger. Now she was wondering if she'd be able to.

"What do you have to say in your defence?" the judge asked, glaring at her and snapping her out of her thoughts.

"I was just following orders, sir." Bitterly, she realizing that the corrupt jackass who gave out those orders was probably getting away with having his career destroyed. Death for those that pull the trigger, a more civilized form of punishment for the ones that give the orders.

One of the prosecution, none other than the famed Lieutenant General Jack O'Neill, sighed. "You know that's not a defence, Colonel."

"Yes, sir." The rest of the trial flew by in a daze, and again she could not shake the faces from her mind. A small part of her noted that she was facing her demons before she died. Did she fear death? No, not anymore. It was a part of life, especially her life. She'd become numb to the concept. But all her work, all her sacrifices, all she had done for _them_, and now they were putting her on trial.

"Colonel Alyssa Jane Mason, you have been found guilty and sentenced to death. Do you have any words you would like to say in your defence, for the record?"

"Yes, sir, I do."

She took a deep breath and continued. "I'm sure that if it were not for the actions of myself, my team, and our predecessors, we would not be standing here today. I couldn't say whether the circumstances would be better or worse, but they'd be different.

"Were our methods extreme? Absolutely. Did we go too far? Probably. Was it necessary? Definitely. Doctor Jackson, you once mentioned that you couldn't imagine what the world would be like post-disclosure. General Carter, you once replied, when prompted about disclosure, and I quote, 'I try not to think about it'. Disclosure always was inevitable.

"The chances of a secret getting out are proportional to the square of the number of people who know it. If one person decided they had enough, the whole program would have been blown wide open. If one person was captured and interrogated by the wrong people, the whole program would have been blown wide open. If one person went on a drinking binge and started babbling, the whole program would have been blown wide open.

"People can't be trusted. Through deliberate action, coercion, or accident, anyone can give away information. Despite what you may have thought, the SGC is not a perfect organization. There's a lot of anger. A lot of resentment. It's not stable. It's a powder keg waiting to explode. All it needs is someone to toss in a match. We threw out the matches, soaked the powder.

"I fought for your future. Now I'm going to die for it. Thank you, sirs and ma'ams. That is all."


End file.
